It's been four years since I wrote Marketing Green Building Services: Strategies for Success, outlining how sustainable design & construction firms should think about green marketing. Since I first wrote that book, nearly 30,000 new projects have registered with LEED and more than 13,000 projects have been certified.
It's been four years since I wrote Marketing Green Building Services: Strategies for Success, outlining how sustainable design & construction firms should think about green marketing. Since I first wrote that book, nearly 30,000 new projects have registered with LEED and more than 13,000 projects have been certified. Obviously, many firms now have the experience of successful projects to back up their marketing claims for sustainable design and construction. Indeed, LEED Gold buildings seldom even rate media mention anymore and even LEED Platinum buildings, about 5 to 6 percent of the total, seldom raise eyebrows.
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The conversation has shifted to Architecture 2030 commitments, Living Building Challenge (LBC) and Zero-Net Energy buildings. And there are about 175,000 LEED Accredited Professionals, more than twice the membership of the American Institute of Architects. So the excitement, for many leading firms, has shifted from proving "we can do this," to "what's next?"
What should then be the green marketing strategy for leading firms? This is a question that I've discussed with a number of design firm CEOs in the past several months. It comes down to a few basic modes of differentiation. Here are a few examples:
1-Budgets: building is still about meeting budgets AND expectations for high-performance sustainable design outcomes. Can you prove that you can design such projects on a conventional budget? Do you have the numbers to document your claims? The New Normal is "frugal green," in which clients expect high-performance outcomes on conventional budgets.
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